Thank you for your venom
by Sky Samuelle
Summary: Sylarelle Ficfest prompt: "You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight and you'll shag and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends.


**Thank you for your venom**

**Sylarelle Ficfest prompt:** _"You're not friends. You'll never be friends. You'll be in love 'til it kills you both. You'll fight and you'll shag and you'll hate each other 'til it makes you quiver, but you'll never be friends. Love isn't brains, children, its blood. Blood screaming inside you to work its will. I may be love's bitch, but at least I'm man enough to admit it."- Spike, __Buffy the Vampire Slayer_

**Summary: **S4 AU. Elle joins Samuel's carnival, but Gabriel doesn't remember her.They have a chance to know each other all over again. To be friends? Yeah, right.

**Rating: **Mature

**Spoiler: **Vague, since this is an AUish version of season 4

**Words: **2090

**Characters: **Samuel, Lydia, Elle, Gabriel

**Ships: **Elle/Gabriel with barely a taste of Samuel/Elle and Gabriel/Lydia

**AN: **Title from a My Chemical Romance song. Thank you to Emmy for betaing.

**--**

The first time Gabriel saw her, Samuel was just showing her around. He though she looked like an angel. Even in her baggy clothes and her jaw-length spiked locks more punk-ish than chic, there was just something about her. Maybe the way she carried herself, indifferent and cautious and cocky at once, like she knew it doesn't matter where you go if nowhere is home, because no place is safe and chaos can erupt everywhere.

Someone nudged him "That's the new one." He turned to look, more for the sake of education than real curiosity, then his eyes found the girl and didn't let her go.

There was something different about that petite, pixie-like creature and it puzzled him that he couldn't pinpoint what it was.

Samuel made his way to him, little blonde in tow. "Gabriel, here you are. We have a new member in the family. This is Elle. "

Gabriel wanted to smile at her, but the taste in his mouth was sour. Elle was prettier close up, beautiful even, but that wasn't the problem.

Her lopsided smirk was more cutting than kind, her bluebell eyes had a coldness lurking behind the charm.

Gabriel saw it and he didn't, but he didn't understand if that mystery was more compelling than frightening.

That's how much the new girl confused him.

--

"You are spending a lot of your time with our new arrival lately." Lydia murmured, not quite bitter, but not pleased, either.

Her fingertips danced over the profile of his shoulder, her bare body brushing against his bare back, eyes closing as images swirled and shattered behind her eyelids.

"We are becoming friends, Elle and I." He answered low, not quite believing his words. Elle was the angel of his fantasies until those rare moments she dropped a hint of something different on him. Purposefully, senselessly. Rivers of poison ran under the flawless glittering façade, he could sense it. It was a poison he wanted to drink until the last drop, to leave her dry and empty. Memoryless and blank like he was.

Why?

It couldn't only be because he thought he could almost _feel_ them, both the honey and the demon inside her, begging to be tasted, explored.

"Oh, you will never be friends." Lydia's grin unfurled slowly, but she didn't complete the phrase dancing on the tip of her tongue.

_You will fight and you will screw until it either kills or saves both of you. Love is not brains, Gabriel. It's not memory._ _It's blood screaming its will. Death can't silence it more than vengeance will water it. Good luck with explaining it to your sweetheart. _

Gabriel ignores her, thinking of the second time he met Elle. Inside Samuel's trailer, clad only in Samuel's shirt, stepping in to move in the background while the two men talked and sipping her tea like it was perfectly normal, walking around _like that_.

Malice on her lips as she caught him glancing at her exposed legs before she looked away and folded them underneath her. Tilting her pretty head aside so casually, allowing him to glimpse the purplish hickey where her neck met her shoulder as the shirt rode up with the careless movement.

Gabriel could be amnesiac, he could even feel lost but he wasn't stupid. He saw that Elle was playing with him. She would pull at invisible strings and then retreat, hiding behind her fractured halo. Yet she was enticing, alluring. He enjoyed their conversations, even if they were full of traps, and he never got tired of studying every single expression of hers, even if he knew she wouldn't touch him or let him touch her.

It drove him mad, _the need_ to know. It consumed him more and more every day.

Gabriel craved to fix himself, but he craved to figure her out more…why she was here, why he sensed this wasn't her place. Why the sight of her was welcome and chilling within the same breath. Why it had felt so inherently _wrong_, to watch her prancing around among Samuel's things, in Samuel's shirt.

No, not only wrong. It had felt like a mockery of something good.

Last night, he dreamt of Elle's hair, loose strands of pale gold, long and spread in the sand.

"_You're hurting me."_

"_I know."_

Her visage smeared with blood, her features slackened in death. Then her features open, twisted in pleasure while his hands stroked her stomach and slid below. Her gaze unguarded, alit with a mischievous flame. Shadows and impressions of her body clinging to his, like she was made to fit him so perfectly.

Gabriel didn't remember nor understand, but he has the feeling there was a key behind every closed door, and it was dangling right out of his reach.

--

They sit in front of a fire, people dancing and drinking around them, but all the loud cacophony surrounding them somehow isolated them from their new, self-appointed family.

He liked the sensation, even more now that Samuel was nowhere to be seen.

Samuel thought God had sent Elle to him, to play the Eve to his Adam. It made little sense if not for the fact that she was truly the perfect complement to the older man, powers-wise: whereas Samuel mastered hearth and wind, Elle controlled water and fire. She had made it rain once as Samuel tried to teach her to control the development of her abilities.

Now, she was playing with sparks… blue lights ran over her open palm and sizzled until her flesh flushed a dark, angry red, lightly scorched.

"That looks like it hurts," he commented idly, hoping she would have taken his overture into conversation and stopped ignoring him. It was kind of annoying when she did.

"It does. In all good ways." Her lips turned up in a delighted grin, and the meanness of it was unnaturally attractive.

But she stopped, and it was amazing to see that her abraded skin healed slowly. She could self-regenerate. Like him.

When she turned her face towards him, he didn't pretend he wasn't staring at her.

"I do that, too. Healing, I mean" He explained, full of wonder. Deep down, he knew there was a connection between them. It was just hard to figure out its nature.

Her smile turned superior, nearly cruel as she tilted her head and looked at him in that detached, calculating manner she sometimes had. She vaguely looked like a predator deciding whether to go in for the kill.

"I didn't use to be capable of it, until the Eclipse. I died and then…I was awake and breathing, naked on a morgue table. And I knew I wasn't the same anymore. All my life I had been unraveling piece by piece, until I thought I couldn't get any worse. But when I was about to be murdered, I didn't fight back at all. I allowed it. I kept thinking it was going to be the end of me anyway. There was something left in me to break, after all and I could feel it being ripped apart. I thought it was kinder, dying like that, rather than living even emptier than I had been. Funny, it isn't? "

Her voice was always a gravelly singsong when she confessed that sort of thing. For some reason, it was more chilling than usual.

"Not really." He cringed, feeling out of his depth, and then added, "I'm sorry" without knowing why.

Elle looked amused by his response.

"You are not, silly boy. But you will be."

He didn't understand what she meant by that.

Until, two weeks later, he saw her face in those mirrors. He had been the one to murder her.

When memory finally came to him, it felt like his mind was crumbling under the weight of it, a castle of cards destroyed by a wisp of air.

It was a rush, a hit of despair and madness.

So, of course, the first thing he did was go to her.

Or try to, because he didn't find her. She wasn't at Samuel's, or in her own tent.

She was waiting in his, looking all flawless and bright, eyes hard, visage expressionless, sitting on his bed. Now that he remembered, he saw her differently. There was more depth to the sight of her. She was no longer a fallen angel or a siren.

"Welcome back, Sylar" She greeted, a bite of frost in her tone. She meant it in more ways than one.

Gabriel had a half-fantasy of curling at her feet and begging for forgiveness, but experienced at the same time a vicious urge to grab her shoulders -so tightly it was going to leave bruises on her fair skin- and shake her violently.

Instead, he walked to her slowly, breathing in and out evenly while a beast screamed in between every beat of his heart and she studied his moves warily.

He fisted her hair and pulled her up forcefully, so he could hiss on her cheek.

"You wanted to drive me insane."

Elle didn't even flinch.

"You wanted me dead."

"You can't be trusted."

A breath away from her face and all he wanted was to kiss her. This was not healthy.

She placed her small hands on his chest, gripping his shirt and digging her nails in. Her fingers sparked and electricity singed both the cloth and his flesh. The smell was unpleasant and the contact more and more painful, but he gripped her hip with his other hand, pulling her close enough that the current would hurt her, too.

It gave him a wicked thrill, knowing that they were sharing the very same brand of pain; he shuddered against her as Elle cringed a little.

Pretty like a picture, even now.

"Come on, kill me again for it. I promise it won't stick."

She pressed more tightly against him, her voice a mocking whisper that fell viciously on his heavy heart. He let his hands spark, too, shocking her enough to make her lightheaded. He stopped as soon he saw her eyes rolling backwards and pushed her down, into the bed, his knee resting between her thighs.

He wasn't going to hurt her again, not like _before_. That would be pointless, since she was already part of him.

"I hate you."

Elle insisted, gazing up at him with that murderous blue fire in her eyes, and he sensed it was nothing but a lie. That realization made him feel alive.

She didn't pull away when he bent over her shivering form and that was enough to convince him. He leaned forward and waited, enjoying the addictive, hostile tension that thickened between their bodies until she wrapped her legs around his waist and he fell on top of her.

She kissed him first, anger melting into some more visceral feeling, and it felt like the first right thing in his world in too long of a time.

This was good: her hands alternately stroking his back and clawing at it, her pelvis rocking against his. It was the natural order of things, and he knew that with the firm certainty of one who understands how everything works.

Soon, he would prove it to her. They wouldn't truly need anything else. Not the hunt, not the revenge. None of those other sweet addictions that were going to pave the path to their self-destruction.

This was enough.

Gabriel bunched her skirt around her waist, pushed her underwear aside and thrust two digits in to penetrate her deeply. He clenched his eyes shut at her whimper and when he opened them again her own eyes were wide and bright and adoring, not hard and cutting like diamonds. It felt just as good, anyway, almost better.

She arched underneath him, her mouth kissing his neck harshly, teeth tugging on those places her tongue would soon soothe.

It was heaven and hell and everything in between. Blood screaming inside his veins to work its will, commanding to ravage and merge and possess.

To dive inside the warm wetness of her body and grasp something he couldn't see.

Clumsily, Elle tugged his pants off, struggled so she could roll them over and be the one in control, riding him. He indulged her for the benefit of looking up at her face, her expression conflicted between agony and pleasure.

"I won't ever forgive you," she promised breathily, rocking gently on him.

He smiled, his palms cupping her ass to angle her lower body so he could slide inside her, because that was a lie, too.

--

END


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